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ProtonMail Is Down

protonstatus.com

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You replied question 2 with question 1: we don't self host email, -because- of deliverability issues.

why are they in the first place?

Deliverability is an issue in both directions:

- when you send emails from MyWebsite.com, you want to make sure that Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Proton Mail, etc users get your email.

- when you receive emails to your hi@mywebsite.com email, you don't want spam

V1 of email providers ostensibly solved this problem using lots of data as well as "supervised" machine learning (e.g. you telling the provider that a specific email is spam).

Self-hosting seems awesome if you're only handing out the email to a few people (probably a few hundred max?), you don't think it will be widely shared, and it's a slightly unique email that makes it hard for a script to guess (e.g. "hello@mywebsite.com" will be easily guessed but "john2@mywebsite.com" may not be)

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#52
post #18

I thought it was my phone or vpn, I restarted it many times. Where would I be without HN :-)

3 days ago, not very far! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32023848 [Hacker News was down]

Geez if both were down at the same time I might have no option but to touch grass.

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#54
I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a ‘partial’ outage.

I don’t care if I can’t access my email for a while.

I very much care if email sent to me isn’t received. They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs or something if it’s this bad and process them properly later. Losing data is not ok.

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#55
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You replied question 2 with question 1: we don't self host email, -because- of deliverability issues.

why are they in the first place?

- because google would prefer you use gmail so they can train their data models on you

- google would also prefer to have a monopoly on all email so that g-suite is necessary to reach your customers.

- because your IP address was at one point an e-mail spam server, but, that only really matters because of the above two reasons. Any nit, however irrelevant, will be used used to beat you into using gmail.

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#56

I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a ‘partial’ outage. I don’t care if I can’t access my email for a while. I very much care if email sent to me isn’t received. They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs or something if it’s this bad and process them properly later. Losing data is not ok.

[deleted]

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#57

I mean, no one cares if accessing mail is down, but it looks like their MX is down, the status page reports incoming mail has a ‘partial’ outage. I don’t care if I can’t access my email for a while. I very much care if email sent to me isn’t received. They should just be dumping all mail received at their MX’s to maildirs or something if it’s this bad and process them properly later. Losing data is not ok.

SMTP is literally built with this scenario in mind. As long as their servers aren't incorrectly reporting a success the sender will (or at least should) retry.

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#58
post #6

I'm kind of curious what the source of the outage is. It looks like most of their services are down, including their incident status page¹. The number of things I can think of that so many different services & are not a massively catastrophic failure is pretty small. Though that may be a lack of imagination on my part. 1: https://status.protontech.ch/incidents/195

They have another status page that currently reports everything is up (it isn't). https://status.proton.me/

"An error occurred on client"

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#59

good thing I just bought a 24 month pro sub last week...

It sure was an excellent purchase -- one of the most secure services available world-wide, operated in the EU with strong privacy and completely outside US jurisdiction. You weren't able to collect your emails for a brief 5 minutes, but you'll live.

Hello from Switzerland :) We are not in the EU not just "technically" but as a fact. None of these agreement covers the exchange of private emails or metadata with the EU.

Re: ProtonMail Is Down

#60
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Few of us urgently depend on email just this hour. I agree that you shouldn't be manically refreshing your email every 5 minutes, but my mail service being down for a few hours would definitely be a major inconvenience if I needed to get a 2fa code during that time. Same if I needed to look at my email to view my tickets for an upcoming event.

It's a misfeature using e-mail for 2FA login codes. TOTP is far more reliable. Any service doing e-mail only 2FA should be called out and questioned. Never assume a user has access to their email at all times.

Right, I must admit I had never heard of email being used for 2FA codes. Is that some kind of standardized protocol or something completely homegrown?

In the far past (and still today with 2 banks) I use hardware/smartcard based solutions. But everything vaguely IT world seems to use TOTP. They typically advertise it as Google Autenticator, but I use different FOSS implementations on both PC and phone and they have worked 100% smoothly.

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